YOLO-TS: Real-Time Traffic Sign Detection with Enhanced Accuracy Using Optimized Receptive Fields and Anchor-Free Fusion

TL;DR

YOLO-TS is a real-time traffic sign detection network that enhances accuracy and speed by optimizing receptive fields and employing an anchor-free fusion strategy, outperforming existing methods on public datasets.

Contribution

The paper introduces YOLO-TS, a novel traffic sign detection network that combines optimized receptive fields with an anchor-free feature fusion approach for improved performance.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on TT100K and CCTSDB2021 datasets.

Achieves higher accuracy and faster detection speeds.

Effectively mitigates grid effects caused by dilated convolutions.

Abstract

Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Evaluation on challenging public datasets, TT100K and CCTSDB2021, demonstrates that YOLO-TS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. The code for our method will be available.